Love, Animation: Anomalisa (Dir. Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson, 1h30m, 2015)
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| Anomalisa theatrical poster |
Adult animation is a strange genre; for every Guillermo Del Toro declaration that animation is a medium, not a genre, and open to all, you have Academy Award hosts joking that it's just for kids. Adult-orientated-animation (as I'm going to term it) has, arguably, a bit of an image problem. For every The Wolf House (2018) and Akira (1988), for every King of Pigs (2013) and Persepolis (2007), there are,particularly on TV and streaming, and from the seedier ends of the anime industry, innumberable purile, pornographic, ultra-violent, mean-spirited sitcoms (hi, Seth MacFarlane) or just an assorted grab-bag of most of those, (hi, South Park and Rick and Morty) animated series. This, to be blunt is not truly a problem with animation itself-there's no shortage of dumb toilet humour series for younger audiences-but more a problem with how much Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks, none of whom have truly stepped outside producing, at times excellent fare for younger audiences, dominate awards season.
Nowhere is this ghettoisation of adult-orientated-animation better seen than in the fact that only three films have been nominated for the Golden Globes: The Illusionist (2010), My Sunny Maad (2021), and the focus of today's review, Anomalisa, also the only adult-orientated-animation film ever to be nominated for an Best Animated Film Oscar. Yet, coming from the pen of Charlie Kaufman, that argonaut of the meta-textual narrative, and the screenwriter of surreal dramas such as Being John Malkovich (1999) and the director of the spectacular, post-modern, and divisive, Synecdoche, New York (2008), comes, via his 2005 stage play, and extensive crowd-funding via Kickstarter, the strange tale of a romance between an unhappy motivational speaker and a young woman, portrayed in the painstaking miniaturised world of stop-motion animation.
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| A world populated by doubles (all voiced by Tom Noonan) |
Kaufman, along with animation director, Duke Johnson, otherwise notable as episode director for the animated black comedy Moral Orel and animation work for the comedy series Community, let the film's opening sequence play out. We are greeted by a cloudscape through which another jet, off in the distance, flies through, the overlapping conversations of the plane's inhabitants slowly revealed, as the camera pulls back through the window to reveal Michael Stone (David Thewlis), and the film's central concept. Not only are the puppets, rendered via thousands of 3D printed faces and mouths and hands and bodies, incredibly lifelike, even as the joins between pieces make their very nature as puppets apparent, but every single other human, young and old, use a single sculpt, a single set of features, as their basis, and all of them are voiced by Kaufman regular, Tom Noonan.
This striking visual delusion, it soon transpires, is a manifestation of Michael's mental illness, in which he sees everyone, including his wife and son, in the world with the same face and voice, and the following sequence, in which he makes his way from the airport to the hotel, in the back of a taxi driven by a man that, in typical Kaufman fashion, proceeds to recommend him a whistle-stop tour of the best that Cincinnati has to offer. Inside the hotel, these identikit puppets hemming in from every direction, each of them voiced by Noonan, only further emphasises his loneliness in this world. In his hotel room, trying to practice for his speech, so Michael is haunted by, and eventually gives in to the temptation to contact, his old flame, Bella, only for their meeting in the hotel's bar to go disasterously, her rebuffing his advances and angrily leaving.
It is here that, forty minutes in, the film uses the monotony, the world filled with copies, with vast numbers voiced by Tom Noonan, to cut across this, for, showering in his room-a remarkable feat given animation's difficulty with water, and mist without extensive post-production-Michael suddenly hears another voice enter his world. The effect is spectacular, and immediate-Michael hurriedly dresses-another visual feat-and rushes out into the now empty corridor, knocking frantically upon doors, before he comes face to face with Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), an insecure young woman who has travelled from California with her friend Emily (yet another Noonan role). Practically overcome with emotion, so he invites both women to drinks in the hotel bar, and soon, enamoured by this sudden newness, this break in his monotony, in his loneliness, he invites Lisa back to his room.
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| Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Michael (David Thewliss) grow closer |
It is this scene that encapsulses the quality of the film. Here, this stop-start animated love-scene, in which the insecure Lisa-her unique face marred by scars-who has never felt particularly special is practuically courted by Michael. She notes that she has always felt in the shadow of her friend, Emily, but there is an undeniable sweetness to the pure joy, even if Lisa herself does not quite understand it, that Michael expresses at the very nature of being able to hear another voice, see another face in this sea of uniformity. Their romance is tender, and tenative, but there is a strange beauty, especially when their encounter turns physical, to this being rendered via two puppets, dozens of parts, and literal weeks of animation and for a moment, they become two people, in love with each other, the artifice of the scene, the entire conceit of the film lifted.
This cannot last-despite a nightmarish, and typically Kaufman-esque sequence in which Michael finds himself journeying into the hotel's outlandish basement, only to be confronted by a horde of Noonan-characters, all intent on connecting with him, leading to a visceral shot in which the bottom half of Michael's face detaches, cradled into his hands, as he runs from his pursuers, and we see the artifice of animation, of these exchangable faces to grant characters expression and life. From here, waking, so the seemingly perfect relationship begins to deteriorate, leading to an effortlessly done sequence in which that bond between Michael and Lisa is slowly broken, until once again, Michael finds himself, alone. The film's coda, involving a bizarre Japanese doll that, unnoticed at a party thrown for Michael on his return, begins to sing, noticed only by him, emphasises his loneliness, this sense of his connections to the world being no better than that to a piece of machine, in a typically Kaufman-esque ending.
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| Michael, mid animation. |
Anomalisa is not an easy piece of cinema-there is a bitter-sweetness to the film, in the tentative relationship between Michael and Lisa, in a story of two people drawn together and then drifting apart. What it undeniably is, though, is a triumph of animation as an artform for all, the first of what will hopefully be many films to use the medium of animation to tell stories of adult fears, adventures, and love.
Rating: Highly Recommended
Anomalisa is available to stream via Apple TV,
and on DVD and BluRay from Artificial Eye. It is also currently available via these platforms in the United States
Next
week, we continue in matters of love, with the charming anime odd-couple film, Josee, the Tiger and the Fish
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